Mikayla's Journal - page 9

Today I implemented an oft-requested feature for MonoDevelop: making the code
completion and info tooltips transparent when the Control key is held down. This
enables you to take a look at the code that the window’s obscuring, without
dismissing the popup.

Here’s a quick summary of interesting things from the past few months that I
haven’t blogged. Unfortunately I can’t give each topic the time it deserves, but
I think that’s better than not mentioning them at all.

Unfortunately, I have blogged very little in recent months. I shall follow this
post with a summary of the things I’ve skipped blogging, but for now, I offer up
the following tantalising screenshot by way of apology:

Now that MonoDevelop 1.0 is on the verge of
shipping,
I have begun to plan the parser that will underpin the ASP.NET code completion
and visual designer in upcoming versions of MonoDevelop. During a discussion
with our ASP.NET expert Marek, I found out
about an obscure ASP.NET feature that currently causes problems for Mono’s
ASP.NET parser, and is entirely counterintuitive to anyone with any XML
knowledge.

So far, all five completed tasks for the Mono
GHOP have been
MonoDevelop -related. I’m really pleased with the amount of interest we’ve had
so far. I’d like to thank our hard-working students and mentors, and the
wonderful people at Google’s Open-Source Program
Office who put this contest
together.

The Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP)
contest has been running for a
couple of weeks now, and the Mono Project has seen a fair bit of action. Sadly
we’ve only had five completed tasks, with a couple more almost done. On a lot of
the claimed tasks, many of the students and mentors have been slow to act, busy
with real life work.

Anonymous delegates are incredibly useful, especially in that they can “capture”
variables from a parent scope. Used within a single thread, they are very easy
to understand. However, if you’re using them to pass data across threads, you
need to understand how the variable capture works.

It’s a bad idea to mess with the packaged version of Mono on your Linux distro
by installing another version of Mono on top of it or into another of your
distro’s standard prefixes such as /usr/local. Your distro’s developers, testers
and packagers have tested the packaged version of Mono to make sure that it
works with the various applications that depend on it, such as MonoDevelop,
Tomboy, F-Spot, Beagle and Banshee. In addition, you’re likely to end up with
unusual errors due to mismatched bits and pieces interacting in unpredictable
ways.

Hot on the heels of Lluis’s MonoDevelop 1.0 Beta
2
announcement, I’d like to announce the availability of frequent builds of
MonoDevelop from SVN trunk, packaged for openSUSE 10.3. If you’d like to get the
latest and greatest bug fixes and features but don’t want to build MD yourself,
head over to my openSUSE Build Service
Sandbox..

I recently added support for GtkSourceView 2 to MonoDevelop, and it can be
enabled with the “–enable-gtksourceview2” configure switch. Unfortunately the
Boo Binding and the Database Addin depend on GtkSourceView# directly, and aren’t
compatible with the API changes in 2.0.